Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard MaeterlinckMaeterlinck from 1932; in Belgium, in France; 29 August 1862 – 6 May 1949) was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who was a Fleming, but wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911 "in appreciation of his many-sided literary activities, and especially of his dramatic works, which are distinguished by a wealth of imagination and by a poetic fancy, which reveals, sometimes in the guise of a fairy...
NationalityBelgian
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth29 August 1862
CountryBelgium
We possess only the happiness we able to understand.
(there is) no other means of escaping from one's consciousness than to deny it, to look upon it as an organic disease of the terrestrial intelligence - a disease which we must endeavor to cure by an action which must appear to us an action of violent and willful madness, but which, on the other side of our appearances, is probably an action of health. ("Of Immortality")
The living are just the dead on holiday
It is the evil that lies in ourselves that is ever least tolerant of the evil that dwells within others.
Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature.
We are never the same with others as when we are alone. We are different, even when we are in the dark with them.
All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing. A day will come when science will turn upon its error and no longer hesitate to shorten our woes. A day will come when it will dare and act with certainty; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour, knowing that it has reached its term.
All mothers are rich when they love their children. There are no poor mothers, no ugly ones, no old ones. Their love is always the most beautiful of joys.
To have known how to change the past into a few saddened smiles-is this not to master the future?
Remember that happiness is as contagious as gloom. It should be the first duty of those who are happy to let others know of their gladness.
You do well to have visions of a better life than of every day, but it is the life of every day from which the elements of a better life must come.
How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words.
Brave old-flowers! Wall-flowers, Gilly flowers, Stocks! For even as the field-flowers, from which a trifle, a ray of beauty, a drop of perfume, divides them, they have charming names, the softest in the language; and each of them, like tiny, art-less ex-votos, or like medals bestowed by the gratitude of men, proudly bears three or four.
An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness. No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it.